Posted December 31, 1969 by Andrew Vawter

The computer gaming market in recent years has been portrayed as a "dying" industry. It is often argued that low sales in the computer market are being cannibalized by higher console sales. Recently if you look at a top 10 best selling software list for the week you’d almost never see more than one or two computer games but a slew of console based video games. This has lead to the assumption that the age of playing games on your computer is over.

How can it be that the computer gaming market is dying? The computer market in general has always been the fastest updating system in the entire gaming industry. It updates every six months to a year with brand new hardware. In order to maintain a "top of the line" computer you would literally have to upgrade almost weekly. And yet, the computer is dying to these console systems that update at most once every three to six years.

One has to ask why then, why is the computer games market dying? The usual answer is to say that the console market is less expensive and overall has a better bang for the buck. That video game consoles like the Xbox and Xbox360, PlayStation 2 have been able to diversify out from being just a gaming machine to a multimedia machine. Modern consoles offer DVD playback, music storage, high end 5.1 Dolby Digital with DTS; today in order to get that kind of performance and capability on a pc you’d spend nearly $1,800. With all these features and at a lower cost than the computer it is believed that people are either unwilling to spend the money or just not interested in maintaining a computer capable of playing the very latest in games at the very highest settings.

Computer games will always have better graphics than consoles. This is due to the fact that a computer tends to update every six months to a year. However, while this may sound like an advantage over the console market one can argue that the price you pay for those graphics is far higher than a console version and they would be right. On average, it will cost around $500 to simply buy a high-end video card whereas the average console will cost you the same amount. Once you take into account all the other parts you need to buy for a high end computer you are often up to a minimum of $1,200 with really nice systems running up to $3,000, compared to a console like the Xbox360 will cost you around $700 for four controllers and two games.

The computer may be an old dinosaur of the past at this point but if people were once willing to spend the money to maintain a good computer then they probably still are. Next week we will be examining other problems people are facing when they play games on the computer.